The invention can be very advantageously used to mount and solder metal elements such as housings or brackets which have to be mounted and soldered on printed circuit boards.
Devices for mounting an element on a board, as described in the opening paragraph, are known from the present state of the art.
The elastic clamping (also termed "snap-in") device requires at least two fixing lugs having a bent end portion which must be passed through the slot. This results in an unsatisfactory fixing lug/slot ratio because the fixing lug is much smaller than the aperture of the slot which results in a poor fixation of the element on the board and, in addition, in a large empty space which must be filled up during soldering, for example wave soldering, and which requires the soldering operation to be repeated several times which leads to a loss of time during assembling and to the copper pads becoming detached from the printed circuit board owing to the use of soldering irons which are too hot.
The device in which mounting is carried out by twisting the end of the fixing lug requires equipment at a fixed work station to carry out this additional time-consuming operation. Moreover, this exhibits a certain aggressiveness relative to the copper pads when the board is a printed circuit board.
Finally, the mounting device comprising sheared lugs has the following disadvantages: a poor fixation, a poor filling-up of the slot owing to the unsatisfactory lug/slot ratio, and a substantial aggressiveness relative to printed circuit boards.